Flex Space Protech Company Valve Announces a $4.5M Seed Round

Valve, a proptech company that focuses on sales and marketing for flexible workspaces, announced a $4.5 million seed round today. Leading the round was Project A; Discovery Ventures also participated. The company will put the money into expanding its reach across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

“Valve provides turnkey sales, marketing and distribution solutions for commercial real estate professionals, online booking platforms and flexible workspace operators to transact across a global network of workspaces seamlessly,” the release said.

Although flexible space leasing has been around for decades, the advent of WeWork’s marketing in its earlier days helped garner wide attention on the approach. Then, with the pandemic and the shuttering of many larger offices, interest and use sharply expanded.

Valve isn’t a pioneer in the space and faces competition from not only other startups, but ventures with the backing of major CRE firms. At the same time, it claims some significant partners, including WeWork, Industrious, Avison Young, Colliers, and JLL, and a “$4.2B of flexible workspace contract value processed by Valve’s interconnected partners.”

As of the evening before the release went live, a GlobeSt.com visit to the company’s website showed a minimum of information—a headline reading “Powering Flexible Workspace Sales and Marketing”—and an email link for more information.

By the morning was a full site with an explanation that the company “launched in late 2019 in the UK.” There is now “access to static content, photos, information and data for 10k workspace buildings globally” with an API [application programming interface] “to enable 3rd parties to build occupier and consumer-facing applications that need this content,” as Valve explained to GlobeSt.com in an email.

There is also a “booking API for querying, accessing and booking workspace dynamically for a growing number of workspace operators and platforms,” according to Valve. This part is currently a pilot program with “select partners” and a planned launch by the end of this year.

That the website previously had so little information suggests that the company had been in an effective stealth mode, building the operations while trying not to attract immediate attention.

This is an extremely tough market with bigger players looking to back players they think could become among the dominant ones. CBRE has put hundreds of millions into Industrious. In the summer, Yardi expanded its coworking and flex space tools. Back in May, Upflex received $30 million in Series-A funding from WeWork, Newmark, and Cushman & Wakefield, among others.

Valve is not the only new startup facing a difficult competitive landscape. The Office Exchange and TROT are two other examples.

But the current market is messy, no one really knows how much demand there will be, and it’s unclear the amount of inventory, and software companies, the market can support.

Addendum: This version of the story with additional details replaced an earlier one.